CephC-LABS/Rebull

About

Abstract

We propose to use archival data to search for, identify, and classify candidate young stellar objects (YSOs) in the Cepheus C region of the molecular cloud Cepheus OB3. Previous work by Gutermuth et al. (2009) identified 114 YSO candidates in Ceph C. The Young Stellar Object Variability (YSOVAR) project (Rebull et al. 2014) identified approximately 300 YSO candidates and work by Orr et al. (2016) refined this list to 245 likely YSOs. More work is needed in this region to identify the youngest Class 0 and Class I candidate YSOs at additional longer wavelengths in the infrared. One purpose of this is to determine which sources are YSOs and which are not, so that time-series data of this region (collected by Rebull et al. 2014) can be interpreted in context to develop a broader understanding of the process of star formation. Our search for YSOs will be driven by longer infrared wavelengths - Herschel (70, 160, 250, 300, 500 μm) and SCUBA data (450, 850 μm). Once we have identified candidate YSOs in these longer wavelengths, we will construct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for each candidate by aggregating available shorter wavelength data from the region. To further aid our classification, we will construct color-color and color-magnitude diagrams for new and previously identified YSOs in this region. YSO candidacy and categorization will be determined from the shape of the SEDs and the locations of objects on the color-color and color-magnitude diagrams.